Socialized medicine has for several years cast its sinister shadow
over our professional and private lives. We have all had to think about
it. We all know it to be a bad thing. A few years ago many of us had the
craven cowardly defeatist attitude of the victim waiting for the knife
of the guillotine to fall. On every hand we heard: "There is
nothing we can do about it," "It's coming, it is
inevitable," "It is the next natural step in the tide of
medical affairs," and so forth. And we were all discouraged by the
unfortunate and apparently ill-advised foray of organized medicine into
the Washington, D.C., case where organized medicine took a beating by
the Supreme Court of the United States. Things looked bad.

But some of us were not willing to lie on our backs like a bunch of
yellow dogs and let our opponents kick us around at will. We decided our
professional and personal freedom was worth fighting for. By far the
most important thing that the American medical profession has done is to
establish the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. We have
armed ourselves with the absolutely irresistible strength of AAPS
non-participation to advance boldly and confidently (on a sure legal
footing and on a powerful nation-wide scale) with a sound, progressive,
positive, modern program of legislation, public relations, and medical
economics, which will surely guarantee to ourselves and to the American
Public--our patients--the preservation of freedom and human dignity in
matters concerning private personal health.

If our efforts are to be of maximum efficiency, if our strategy is
to be fully effective, we must do two things. First we must keep our
goals in clear focus. We must not let them become clouded by any selfish
personal or professional interests. We must not let them become blurred
by the smudge of hatefulness, vindictiveness, pride, arrogance, or
prejudice. We must not let them be obscured by indolence, indifference,
or discouragement. We must constantly remember: "The ultimate test
of all AAPS actions shall always be the public interest." And
second, we must accurately and intelligently appraise the strength and
importance of those tangible and intangible forces which oppose us. What
is the identity actually of our greatest opponent in our struggle to
defeat the forces of regimentation, compulsion, coercion, and despotism?

Our greatest opponent is not Murray, Wagner, Dingell, and others of
their ilk. Our greatest and most powerful opponent is not Isadore Sidney
Falk and his army of workers in the Bureau of Research and Statistics in
the Federal Security Administration. Our greatest opponent is not Mike
Davis and his almost unlimited funds from Rosenwald Foundation. Our
greatest opponent is not the bosses of the C.I.O., the A.F. of L., not
Governor Warren of California or President Truman, not Communism or the
International Labour Organisation. It is not even the rank growth of the
weeds of Paternalism planted so widely in our social structure during
the reign of Franklin the Great.

No, powerful as they all are individually and collectively as
pavers of the Road to Serfdom, we have an even more powerful if less
tangible opponent.

Our most powerful and ominous opponent fortunately is also our
strongest potential ally. He is the inertia of every American physician
who does not inform himself of the sinister significance of Socialized
medicine and who does not throw his weight against it in wholehearted,
voluntary, intelligent, persistent opposition. He is your colleague and
mine. He is Doctor Inertia.

Until that day when a substantial majority of American Physicians
have voluntarily chosen to affiliate themselves personally with AAPS, we
must keep our eye on the Bull's eye; we must keep our eye on the
grey blurred lethargic unthinking Bull's eye--the countenance of
our greatest, yes, our only really vital opponent, our friend and
colleague who has not soberly, sincerely, and enthusiastically affixed
his signature to an AAPS application blank.

[Presented at the 1947 Annual Meeting of the Association of
American Physicians and Surgeons]